


Notes on the Art of Poetry

by EstellaB



Category: Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
Genre: F/M, Gen, John Keats - Freeform, Nonsense, Sibling friendship, awkward conversations about dead poets, but hopefully also kindness, deadlines, dick is an adequate brother, dot is a good sister, silliness, tea and toast
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-17
Updated: 2019-03-17
Packaged: 2019-11-23 07:20:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18148814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EstellaB/pseuds/EstellaB
Summary: Dick has arrived at his sister's flat in need of an urgent recommendation.





	Notes on the Art of Poetry

Dorothea Callum was seventeen hours away from a final, _final_ , absolutely _non-negotiable_ deadline when her brother turned up out of the blue at her little flat. She had been up all night, her hair and clothes were in disarray, and she had an enormous ink stain on her left hand that she had been smudging unconsciously all over her face. She peered at Dick, puzzled, from beneath a mess of tangled bangs and blue smears. Nonetheless, she let him in, and even made him a cup of tea. They sat for a few minutes in silence, Dot mentally rearranging a few misplaced sentences, Dick looking down at his mug.

“Yes?” she prompted eventually. “It’s nice to see you, but you do live several hundred miles away and I didn’t have any idea that you were coming.”

Dick opened his mouth, and closed it again. He cleared his throat. “Did you know-” he began uncertainly, and stopped. He fiddled with the button at the top of his shirt, and coughed a few times. 

Dot bit her lip to prevent a sigh of impatience. She fished among the papers on her desk for a book on the Inca Empire that had been intended for her father’s Christmas present, and handed it to Dick. He gazed at it uncomprehendingly. “Look, Dick,” she said, as kindly and politely as she could. “I really, truly have to finish this, and I still have a lot of work to do. You are very welcome to stay here and read for as long as you like. I have plenty of tea and biscuits.”

As Dot got up and returned to her desk, Dick looked down at the book that she had pushed into his hands. She was already beginning to write furiously, and he decided to take her invitation to sit quietly and read.

Dot worked for what seemed like hours and no time at all, pages falling to the ground around her. At last, she felt like she was making progress on her final changes – at last she was getting close to the story that she actually wanted to submit. She had, it must be confessed, completely forgotten about her brother in the corner. When she had first started working, she had glanced over at him curiously a couple of times, and seen that he was skimming the first page over and over. As she had immersed herself in her book, though, she had lost all sense of time and place. She was almost ready to throw her pen in the air and declare victory.

“Dot,” Dick suddenly burst out from the other side of the room, “which ones are the good poems?”

Dot, who was returning from very far away, assumed she had misheard him. “Pardon?”

He fidgeted in his chair, not looking her in the eye. “Which ones,” he repeated, slowly, with careful enunciation, “are the good poems?” 

This was much, much more interesting than final edits. She was more or less there anyway. Dot tossed her pen down and went to sit in the chair opposite him. “Which ones are the good poems?” she clarified, still not entirely sure that this was really happening.

“The good ones,” he agreed. “The good poems.”

“I suppose that depends,” Dot replied, calmly, as if her brother regularly appeared at her door in need of an urgent poetry recommendation. “What do you want them for?”

Dick polished his glasses. He mumbled something that Dot couldn’t make out at all, cheeks suddenly very red, and cleared his throat for what seemed like the twentieth time that evening. 

“The poems,” he explained, “that you give to a girl. So that you are doing it properly.”

Dot’s eyebrows shot up. “You want poetry to help you… seduce someone?”

He buried his face in his hands, and she bit her lip again, this time trying to choke down a giggle. After a long moment, he looked up and corrected her. “A… maybe a… declaration of… of intention.”

“I see.” She got up and started making tea and toast, guessing that perhaps this conversation would be easier for her brother if she wasn’t looking at him. “Dick, you hardly seem the poetry sort. Why can’t you just… well, declare your intentions?”

“You have to do it properly,” he insisted. “Look, I can’t just go up to… well, and say ‘you are by far the best person I have ever known or will ever know; please be my girl’. That isn’t… it isn’t doing it properly. If… if you really think that, you want to do it properly. So that it’s… so you’ve shown her. That it’s real and that she… that you want to do it properly. Because it’s real and she’s real.”

Dot grinned broadly at the kettle, but her voice was very matter of fact. “Well, in that case, I suppose it depends very much on the girl. Surely you know enough of us to realise that. What’s she like?”

“Well, what if… what if it were a girl like… well, something like…” he lost his nerve, and finished “Nancy, for example?”

An involuntary peal of laughter escaped Dot, but she hastily turned it into a cough. She filled the teapot and sat back down. “If it were Nancy,” she replied, “or someone like her, I don’t think poetry would the right approach at all. If it were Nancy, you would probably want to go for a hike up some very impressive mountain, and talk to her bluntly and straightforwardly. Anyway, if it were someone like Nancy, I doubt that she would wait about for you to declare your intentions because she would be too busy announcing her own.”

“I suppose that’s fair.” Dick poured the milk and fiddled with the tea cosy. “What if it were someone like Peggy?”

This was very slightly more plausible, so Dot managed to take it seriously. “I suppose someone like Peggy might like something like – I don’t know, like _A Birthday_ , by Christina Rossetti. It’s very cheerful, it’s full of nature imagery – it seems a bit like Peggy.”

“And… and if it were… someone like…” He broke off uncomfortably and poured the tea. “Like Susan?”

“I don’t know if Susan would like poetry either,” Dot mused. “Although I think she did enjoy studying Shakespeare at school, come to think of it, so maybe one of those. Or,” she continued, warming to her topic and losing perspective, “she might want one of the _Sonnets from the Portuguese_ – those are beautiful, and noble, but they are also practical somehow – no fancy language.”

Dick took a swallow of his tea, and looked at the table, the tips of his ears. Once again, he opened and closed his mouth a few times, before giving up and miserably having another mouthful of tea. She reached out and squeezed his arm briefly. Somehow, all the hilarity had suddenly drained out of the situation, and she felt painfully sympathetic.

Dot got up and walked over to her bookshelf, coming back with a slim, well-worn volume. “Titty loves Keats,” she said, very gently. “Do you remember the peak in Darien? It’s a line from one of his poems. Keep this, and you might be able to find something in it that suits.” She smiled at him, folding his hands around the book. “But, truly, Dick, Titty likes you even more than she likes Keats. I’m certain she would rather hear from you than him. If I were you, I would go with your first thought instead of worrying about all of this. That would be doing it properly. Honestly.”

Dick secreted the book in his bag wordlessly, and accepted Dot’s offer of a bed on the sofa. (Thankfully she remembered about the toast before they turned in, and pulled it out from under the grill just before it burst into flames).

Brother and sister parted ways very early the next morning – Dot to hand in the final draft of her book, and Dick on private errands of his own – and Dot didn’t hear anything more of him for several days. She was just starting to worry that she had badly misread the situation and might need to go and see how he was coping when she received that morning’s post. Along with a very encouraging letter from her publisher, a small picture postcard fell out.

It was nothing special. A view of the lake on a sunny day, with little sailing dinghies in the distance. But, on the back: _Thank you. D &T._

**Author's Note:**

> I stole the title from Dylan Thomas. I like his poem of the same name very much, so it is intended as a compliment. Also, hi! I am EstellaB from fanfiction.net and I used to be ravenpuffheadcanons on tumblr.
> 
> I got sidetracked thinking about all the different poems that the S&A characters would like. What do you think?


End file.
